Posts published by Joseph Carens

An immigrant from Honduras presented her daughter's birth certificate to a United States border patrol agent in Texas. Credit John Moore/Getty Images

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

President Obama’s recent initiative on immigration has reignited the national debate on the issue. This interview, the first in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical ideas that underlie this debate. My interviewee is Joseph Carens, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He immigrated to Canada from the United States in 1985 at the age of 40 and is a citizen of both the United States and Canada. He is the author of “The Ethics of Immigration.” — Gary Gutting

GARY GUTTING: In your recent book, you talk a lot about the rights of people to immigrate or to remain in a country after they’ve immigrated. What would you say to those who think that immigration policy should instead focus on the right of a country to decide who gets to live there? They might agree that there are extreme situations — say the threat of genocide — in which people have a right to immigrate, but generally, they’d say, the citizens of a country have a right to decide who they want to take into their community. How do you respond to that position?

JOSEPH CARENS: I think this way of posing the question confuses two issues. The first is the question of who ought to have the authority to decide what a policy will be. The second is whether that policy is morally acceptable. Someone can have the right to make a decision and can still make a decision that is morally wrong. Let’s assume for the moment that the citizens of a country have a moral and legal right to determine who they will take into their country. It doesn’t follow that whatever they decide is morally defensible. Even apart from the question of people fleeing genocide, I think everyone today would agree that it would be morally wrong to exclude people on the basis of race or religion. Read more…